It s tough to be beautiful. Attractive people are treated unfairly in the job market. They re treated unfairly in school. They re even treated unfairly in court.

Of course, it s a rather agreeable sort of unfairness. Beautiful people tend to be paid more roughly 5% more for men and 4% for women, according to research by economist Daniel Hamermesh, who also found a large penalty for being particularly unattractive. They tend to get better grades. (A study published last year in the journal Labor Economics found attractiveness had a positive and significant correlation with high school GPA.) And they re likely to get lighter sentences as criminal defendants and higher damage awards as plaintiffs, according to studies of real and simulated trials.

But is beauty an unmitigated blessing?

A new study forthcoming in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology takes a look at attractiveness in two scenarios where it shouldn t but probably does make a difference. The researchers find that the interaction between attractiveness and success isn t as straightforward as it might appear.

In the first of two experiments, researchers at the University of Munich and Florida State University had 2,639 students imagine being members of a scholarship selection committee and asked them to evaluate a set of three finalists. These finalists had fictional profiles, including detailed information on their demographics, major, grades and extracurricular activities. The twist: One was attractive, one average, and one unattractive.

The relationship between the candidates attractiveness and their stats was randomized, so every candidate should have had a roughly one-in-three chance of winning the scholarship. Yet, the expected pattern emerged clearly: Attractive candidates were more likely to get the scholarship.

Here s where the results get complicated. Attractive candidates got a boost from judges of the opposite sex. (Men picked the attractive female candidate about 50% of the time; women picked the attractive male candidate roughly 43% of the time.) However, attractive candidates got no boost when evaluated by someone of the same sex. In fact, when women rated women, attractive female candidates were actually punished. Women selected the attractive female candidate only 12% of the time, well below the 33% level predicted by chance. (Men in this experiment did not appear to punish attractive male candidates.)

Where does this behavior come from? The bias toward attractive people has long seemed to come from a halo effect, where we assume someone who is attractive is also smart, nice, moral, etc. That effect may well be in play, but the results of the scholarship study suggest something else is at work, as well.

To dig deeper, the researchers conducted a second experiment this one taking into account the attractiveness not just of the person being judged, but also of the person doing the judging.

This time, 622 students were asked to make a hiring decision about a fictional job candidate. While the information about the candidates qualifications was held constant, their level of attractiveness varied. And the students themselves were rated for attractiveness by an outside panel.

The results shed some light on the bias. Moderately attractive men and women discriminated against attractive candidates of their own sex, but highly attractive participants showed no such bias. (Also, moderately attractive participants gave bigger boosts to attractive candidates of the opposite sex than attractive participants did for instance, an attractive woman wasn t as impressed by an attractive man, and vice versa.)

The authors theorize that the moderately attractive raters saw the attractive candidates as a social threat in other words, they were jealous. Or, at least, they were aware on some level that attractive people tend to get most of the breaks and they did what they could, consciously or unconsciously, to level the playing field.

Given the overall picture we have of beautiful people getting better wages, better grades and evaluations, and an easier time in court, this anti-attractiveness bias hardly negates the more familiar beauty bias. Yet, as these studies suggest, some people will, in fact, hate you because you re beautiful.